Today in the National Hockey League, there are five above-average teams and five below-average teams. Beyond that, we have what we’ll call the Tepid Twenty.

Anaheim, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis and maybe San Jose don’t often need much “puck luck” to win. Those teams just have to play to their ability. On most nights, Buffalo, Florida, Calgary, Edmonton and the New York Islanders are beyond the help of “puck luck.”

With the Tepid Twenty, however, every game is a coin flip. Most of their contests are decided by a fortuitous bounce or by a call from the ever-intrusive referees. But to be in a position to benefit from that bounce or that call, each of those teams has to be functioning on all cylinders. Everyone is so equally matched that the margin for error is microscopic.

Up until a week or so ago, the Wild were not playing well enough to participate in the coin flip.

This was a tragedy in the making. The team had fallen out of playoff position. Coach Mike Yeo was close to being out the door. Xcel crowds had turned surly during a six-game losing streak.

And then in their darkest hour, they turned it around. The Wild had won four straight until losing to the Colorado Avalanche on Saturday. But they were right there until an empty-netter at the end made it 4-2. It was a typical Tepid Twenty coin flip of a game.

“Tonight, definitely, we felt in here that we played a pretty strong game and gave ourselves a pretty good chance to win, anyway,” said Wild center Kyle Brodziak.

But this is a relatively new feeling. During the losing streak, the players didn’t feel anything like this.

“No, I think that was a tough stretch for us when we weren’t playing our best hockey,” Brodziak said. “I don’t think we were a very confident group at that time. We found a way to fight through that.”

The Wild had been bowled over by — drum roll, please — adversity. I’ve grown to dislike that word. But hockey coaches embrace it. They talk about facing it, overcoming it, getting past it, learning from it …

Welcome to the real world, eh? It’s just that the rest of us don’t harp on it.

The word has come to mean every little thing that goes wrong. If a key player gets hurt and has to sit out, that qualifies as adversity — even though every team goes through that. But hit the post, get a bad call or a funny bounce, and the adversity speech is dusted off and trotted out.

If there isn’t enough arugula in the salad during the postgame spread, it’s just another bit of adversity to overcome. Chin up, chest out, persevere through the iceberg lettuce and learn from the experience.

OK, well what does the adversity scorecard look like? Who is winning that game? Until recently, the answer was: Not the Wild. Minnesota has experienced some … negative occurrences. (I won’t use the “A” word anymore.) Zach Parise’s injury was a tough blow. The loss of Josh Harding was an even bigger blow. The team careened downhill.

Then it got ridiculous, with Mikko Koivu and Jared Spurgeon heading to the infirmary. It seemed as if a different player got hurt every game. Suddenly, the Wild were beyond the “A” stage and appeared to be in disaster mode.

And then they coalesced. Even as players went down, the team snapped out of it.

“It’s funny how that sometimes works,” said Dany Heatley, who assisted on both Wild goals Saturday.

Even without several key players, the Wild still fall into that vast, silent majority of NHL hockey teams. All they have to do is hang tight and they will be around at the end to see who wins the flip.

“We feel pretty comfortable in those close games,” Brodziak noted. “Almost every game we play in is a tight game. And when we get down to later in the game, we feel comfortable that we’ll get an opportunity and cash in on it.”

The Wild haven’t played lights out during the turnaround. In fact, they were outshot badly in a couple of recent victories. But they are hanging tough. Saturday night against the Colorado Avalanche, they were right there again. They just came up tails.

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